Paternal Instincts
by summerlinde
Summary: Oneshot collection. Logan doesn't expect to become a father. Ever. Especially not a single one. That doesn't mean it doesn't happen anyway. I'll be putting new oneshots in chronologically, so new stuff may appear in the middle.
1. Paternal Instincts

**Paternal Instincts: A baby arrives at the mansion, and Logan's not quite sure how he feels about it.**

* * *

Evolution was a messy and complicated business, and as soon as you thought you might have figured it out, everything changed on you.

You realized that there were people out there like you, and then that they weren't as much like you as you'd thought. You realized there was a logical explanation for your existence, but then you realized that even though you knew what you were, you still didn't know how you'd gotten to be that way. Why you? Why not someone else? How did this whole thing work, anyway?

And then there were the things that changed what _everybody _thought. Things like an infant born a mutant. Everyone knew that mutant powers manifested at puberty, and that if they manifested earlier, they didn't do it much earlier. This baby, waving its tiny claws in the air from the basket on the church steps, broke all of those rules.

There weren't many people who were willing to protect mutants. There weren't many who would have taken care of the baby. But this baby wasn't just born a mutant, she was born lucky, and the priest who picked her up knew exactly what to do. He'd met a man once, a man who knew a guy who knew a place where mutants could go. A place where they could be safe.

The baby was taken to a friend, who took her to a friend, who took her to a friend, on down the line. The friends of the mutants. She slept in nursery cribs, drank formula donated by a dozen congregations to be given to the poor, rode in old car seats in older church vans, and wove her way slowly across the country. Eventually, she made it to Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, and that was where she stayed.

What _didn't_ make it to Xavier's was the note they'd found with her, the note that said a dozen awful things about her, that called her a devil and a punishment and a tiny, breathing mistake. The letter railed against her father, detailed a one-night stand and said her mother should never kept the baby, but now the letter was long gone, left in a dozen pieces in a landfill somewhere back along the road. The baby was safe, and all of that was in the past.

In the present, the baby was not a devil, a punishment, or a mistake. She was merely a mystery. Hank wondered why her powers had come out so soon. Ororo wondered where they would put the baby so she could be taken care of without waking all the older children twelve times a night. Charles wondered if more babies would be coming their way soon.

Logan just wondered.

The moment the baby's tiny fist had shot out two thin bone claws from between the knuckles, every eye in the room had turned to him, including the eyes of the priest who had brought her here. Beast's tests had just confirmed what everyone already knew – she was Wolverine's. He just couldn't figure out how. He didn't know where she'd come from or how she'd gotten here. Mostly, he didn't know why everyone seemed to think he should care. He hadn't wanted a baby. He hadn't _expected_ a baby. And he wasn't sure why everyone seemed to think a few lines of DNA up on the screen in the infirmary were going to change that.

A crash rang out from upstairs and Logan found himself left alone with the baby as the others ran off to see what it was. They didn't approve of leaving the kids to fend for themselves for too long, but he thought the whole lot of them might make fewer messes if they had to clean them up themselves. Though with the baby – the baby really shouldn't be left alone. Probably.

Logan didn't know much about babies, but he was pretty sure you were supposed to watch them all the time so they didn't choke on their spit or throw poop at anyone. Or something. And apparently now that he was a dad, he was supposed to be the one watching the baby. Like a little bit of scientific evidence was going to turn him magically into the father of the year.

A second crash sounded from upstairs and the baby started crying. "Great," Logan growled under his breath. He walked over to the lab table where Hank had set the baby on a blanket while he did the few tests they'd thought were necessary. The infant's eyes were screwed tightly shut, her face was as red as the wispy baby hair on her head, and her arms were flailing, claws extended and slicing through the air, as she screamed with all the force of a surprisingly strong pair of lungs.

"Oh, come on," he muttered. He thought quickly through everything he knew about babies. They ate, they slept, they pooped. If they were crying, it usually had something to do with one of those things. Maybe she was mad that the noise had woken her up. What was he supposed to do about that? She'd just have to get over it. Maybe her diaper was dirty. He sniffed her, keeping his head away from the reach of her claws. Nope. Not smelly.

So, either she was hungry or whatever was wrong he couldn't fix anyway. Great. He decided he'd better go find the baby formula the priest had brought with him, because that was really all that was left to try. It was probably in the kitchen somewhere.

He was halfway out the door when he realized that he couldn't just leave the baby here. Especially not when she was wailing like this. He'd have to take her with him. Walking back over to the table, he realized he had no idea how to hold the baby. The others had all been handing the baby off to each other like it was nothing, but he hadn't held her yet. No one in their right mind handed _Wolverine _a baby, especially when he stood there glaring at anyone who moved toward him with it.

Thinking back to the way the others had held her, he decided that he thought he could probably pick the baby up without breaking her. She was so small she looked like she could snap in two in his hands. But then, if she'd inherited his powers, she probably wasn't as breakable as she looked. He hoped she wasn't as breakable as she looked.

Reaching down, he started to pick up the baby, only to be scratched in the arm by the flailing claws. He growled under his breath, frustrated. The scratch would heal, of course, it already had, but he couldn't help feeling like any of the others could have picked up the baby without getting stabbed. "Stop it."

The baby kept screaming, slashing him across the chest and tearing a hole through his shirt as he tried to cradle her in his arms like the others had. "Oh, you think you're tough, huh?" Suddenly, she hiccupped, right in the middle of a scream. Her eyes flicked open in surprise and she hiccupped again, then fell silent. He didn't know why she'd stopped, but he didn't much care. Anything was better than the screaming. Quiet now, she looked up at him intently, as if realizing this was a new person, her dark eyes staring into Logan's face.

Logan studied the baby in return, as her face faded to a less vibrant red, then to pink, then to a peachy color. Her claws retracted back into her hands as she moved her right fist to her mouth to suck on her knuckles. Taking her other hand gently in his, he watched the skin grow closed again. "Tougher than you look, anyway," he muttered. The baby cooed back at him. "Right," he added, "You have no idea what I'm saying."

The thought occurred to Logan that he could probably put the baby back down now that she'd stopped crying. But then, it didn't _hurt _to keep holding her in case she started crying again when he put her down. She yawned and Logan found himself smiling at her. Maybe the baby wasn't so bad when she wasn't screaming. She looked up at him again for one long moment, long enough for him to notice how brown her eyes were.

"Hmm. Got my eyes," he muttered pensively. Now there was an odd thought, one he hadn't ever expected to have. His daughter had his eyes. His daughter. There was another thought he'd never expected to have.

Suddenly, it all hit him. This thing in his arms – she was _his_. The thought was electrifying, terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. His heart pounded with the shock of it. Wolverine's senses went into hyper drive, his own heartbeat ringing loudly in his ears, with the baby's echoing it more slowly as she snuggled into his chest, apparently deciding that she liked him. She smelled like him. She looked like him. She even fought like him, or she would when she grew up. The baby fell asleep again, but Logan was far from drowsy. He felt more alert, more alive than he had in ages.

Storm walked into the room, her feet soft on the floor, but not silent enough for him to miss, on edge like this, and Logan whirled around to face her, clutching the baby defensively to his chest until he could be sure it was her. He was pretty sure he could take off someone's head with one hand even if he was using the other to hold the baby.

Ororo smiled like she knew something he didn't, and Logan suddenly felt awkward. "Baby's asleep," he growled. "Don't wake her up."

Storm seemed to get control of her face, but Logan couldn't help feeling like she was holding back a grin. "Ok," she answered quietly. "I think we're going to keep her in Charles's office until we figure out where to put her." She started walking toward him. "I can take her."

Logan walked the rest of the way to meet Ororo in the center of the room, but at the last moment, he couldn't quite let go of the baby. "What, I can't carry my own kid up a flight of stairs?" he asked hostilely, shoving past her. Storm followed Wolverine out of the room, not bothering to hide her grin once she was out of his line of sight. Evolution changed everything, eventually. It just didn't always do it the way you expected it to.


	2. The Sick Day

**Tyra is 6. She never gets sick, but every once in a while, she still gets to take a sick day.**

* * *

Charles was never quite sure what he expected when the door to his office swung open first thing in the morning, but Logan calmly informing him that he and his daughter had chicken pox and would be taking a sick day was definitely not it. "You do realize that an average child would be out for at least a week with chicken pox...," he answered, taking a stab at what was really going on without reading Logan's mind.

Tyra had inherited her father's regenerative powers, and neither of them _should_ be sick, but stranger things had happened since he started the Institute. Still, Logan was clearly well, and if his daughter ever managed her first illness, he doubted Wolverine would look anywhere near this calm.

"Oh," Logan replied, "Better make it the flu, then."

Charles forced himself not to laugh. "Still at least a week."

Logan raised an eyebrow, "A cold?"

Charles thought for a moment. "Just tell them it's a stomach bug."

Logan nodded, face still serious even though Charles himself couldn't help grinning. "You know, I think you're right. I think it _is_ just a stomach bug. Probably be better by tomorrow."

As Logan closed the door behind him, Charles almost called him back to ask what had prompted this spontaneous sick day, but then he decided it didn't matter. While Wolverine would never admit it, they all knew he was taking Tyra's acsension to elementary school and away from home harder than he'd expected to. He supposed he could grant the gruff PE teacher one day hanging out with his daughter again.

Out in the hall, Logan called the school, informing them calmly that Tyra was sick and would be staying home today. Then he hung up and rubbed his hands together, excited about the sick day. It had taken some doing, but Tyra had convinced him that it would be suspicious if she _never_ got sick and missed school, and now that he had decided to do this – well, the decision was made, the pieces were in motion, and there was no going back now even if he wanted to. So he might as well enjoy it.

They'd spent hours last night planning for today instead of reading Tyra's usual bedtime story and while he hadn't thought he would actually do it, he'd eventually crumbled and now he was more excited than he wanted to admit to spend the day with his six-year-old

First on the agenda was breakfast. Usually, breakfast was a hurried affair for everyone, as they tried to get most of the kids off to high school, their two eighth-graders off to middle school and Tyra to her own school without anyone being late. Milk jugs and orange juice cartons made the rounds and ran empty and sat leaking their last few drips onto countertops and tables, cereal boxes flew through the air and spilled on the floor, coffee landed in people's laps, kids snuck spoonfuls of sugar from the container by the coffee pot and ate it by itself, and at the end of it all, he and Hank were usually left to clean it all up while Ororo met delivery vans and took inventory and replenished their breakfast supplies for the next day's assault on the kitchen. He'd rather clean than have to deal with the complicated color-coordinated paperwork of Storm's system. But today, he was doing something different, because today they were going to have breakfast separately after the rest of the kids left.

He packed the older kids off to school with a little more force than he usually did, ending the normal morning chaos, and then pulled out the package of bacon he'd hidden away carefully at the back of the fridge, smiling to himself. He'd missed bacon, but with so many kids and so little time in the mornings, they just couldn't make it very often. Dinner was often fairly involved, but breakfast simply didn't work that way.

Tyra helped Hank clean up, but then she insisted in her adorably strict six-year-old manner that he and Aunt Ororo and Uncle Charles all stay out of the kitchen because she and Daddy were making them a surprise. He doubted they'd be very surprised by their "surprise," because Ororo had been in the kitchen when he came in from his late-night grocery run with the supplies for breakfast, but he didn't say anything. Instead, he got out a bowl and they got down to work.

By the time Charles came to breakfast, the table held French toast and bacon and orange juice and the rest of the kitchen was nearly as big a mess as it had been when the rest of the kids had left for school. A trail of drips led from the bowl of egg wash to the stove where Tyra had dripped it as she handed the bread over to her dad, the raisins they'd put on top had rolled under the counters and the table after Tyra and Logan had thrown handfuls of them at each other, and their powdered sugar fight had left a thin film of the stuff nearly everywhere and whitened both Howletts' hair so that Logan looked, for the moment, almost as if he was finally aging.

Tyra had a splotch of cinnamon on the side of her nose, but she refused to let her father wash it off, running around the room as he chased her, dishrag dripping water onto the floor behind him. "Tyra Anne, get back here!" Charles almost intervened, but with Hank and Ororo already on the way, he decided to stake his claim on the first of the toast instead, watching as Logan resorted to his usual tactic of tackling his daughter and pinning her arms down.

To anyone not familiar with Logan and Tyra or not aware of their powers, Logan would probably have seemed nearly abusive most of the time. Those who knew them could see that they were much more like a lion with a cub. They fought and wrestled and rough housed and sometimes Tyra bit her father and sometimes Logan dragged his daughter around in a headlock and no one thought much of it, not even when Logan was sitting on the kitchen floor on top of his six-year-old, scrubbing cinnamon off her face while she tried to wriggle out from under him.

By the time Logan had managed to get the worst of the mess off of Tyra, Hank and Ororo had shown up, and when he let her up, she bounced joyfully over to the table, inviting them to breakfast as if Professor Xavier and Dr. McCoy hadn't already started eating. Ignoring them, she served Ororo some toast and then got plates for herself and her dad, who was trying to get the egg up off the counter before it dried.

"Me'n Daddy did good, didn't we?" she asked, pouring syrup all over her plate until everything was swimming in it.

"You certainly did, Tyra." Charles said, after swallowing his orange juice. "You should make us breakfast _every_ morning."

Tyra grinned, but the Professor didn't even need to look to know that Logan was glaring. He probably shouldn't put ideas into Tyra's head, especially not ideas like ditching school to make breakfast every morning. She had enough ideas of her own. He just wasn't sure he cared. They usually didn't like to admit it, but most of the staff members were as taken with the little redhead as her father was, in spite of how much trouble she could get into.

It had been touch-and-go for a while when she was younger, but she'd finally grown up enough to be left alone for the occasional 15-minute stretch without doing too much damage. Six years old and indestructible was a much better combination than the ages from two to four had been with her powers. She at least understood, now, that other people could get hurt and they wouldn't get better right away like she did.

As penance for the fact that Tyra had spent most of breakfast debating with her father the merits of getting Uncle Charles to convince her first grade teacher that she wasn't supposed to be at school until the afternoon, he decided to help Hank and Ororo with the cleanup and let Tyra and Logan run off for the rest of their day.

It won him one grudging half-smile from Logan and one sunshiny hug from Tyra and that was probably the best he could have expected to get in return for sweeping powdered sugar off the floor. Even when said powdered sugar was also sprinkled with squashed raisins that had been stepped on to make a sticky paste that couldn't have held onto the sugar better if they'd been designed to do it. Even so, they got it clean and he rolled back to his office, smiling at the clacking sounds coming from Tyra's room, ones he recognized immediately because they were coming from the Rock'Em Sock'Em Robots game they'd dug out of the attic last Christmas. He could remember Banshee and Thunderbird playing with them when they were new, and it was good to know they were back in use again.

The rest of the day was a series of interruptions for the rest of the staff, and Logan felt absolutely no remorse over it. Living in a mansion full of teenagers, he was sure they were used to it. He certainly was. And anyway, they were the fun sort of interruptions, rather than the usual Jamie-stole-my-hairbrush, Ray-hit-me, I-think-Jubilee's-leg's-broken sort of interruptions.

He and Tyra buzzed Hank's office four times with a remote control helicopter. Logan dragged Ororo into a tea party so he wouldn't have to do it alone. A few of the water balloons from their water fight broke against Charles's window – and not all of them were accidental. When Hank nearly tripped over the hot wheel track, it really wasn't their fault, but he still decided that meant it was time to move on to something else.

And then they read Tyra's favorite book, _Where the Wild Things Are_, and the usual chaos followed. With one childish shout of "Let the wild rumpus start!" doors shut, locks clicked, and he and Tyra had the run of the mansion so they could roar their terrible roars and gnash their terrible teeth and roll their terrible eyes, and most especially so they could show their terrible claws.

They had stopped needing the actual book a long time ago. He was pretty sure everyone in the mansion had it memorized, but even if they didn't, he and Tyra did, and they acted it out as often as they read it, starting with a staring contest he always threw because Max had won in the book and ending with a long chase through the mansion as he shouted "I'll eat you up, I love you so!" and Tyra laughed uproariously. And when he caught her, he always made sure to do it where no one could see them, because even though it actually came in the middle of the book, after he caught her, he always told her that he loved her "best of all."

All too soon, he realized it was nearly time for the older kids to come home from school, and Logan decided they needed to do something quiet and peaceful and out of the way, something that didn't require any cleanup afterward and that wouldn't get in the way as the other kids got home and took their space back over. And so they watched his favorite movie of all time. The only movie he and Tyra could both reliably sit through without getting bored. _The Karate Kid._

At the start of the movie, it was just him and his daughter curled up together in the corner of the couch. And then Ororo took the other end of the couch. And then the older kids got home and Sam said it was his favorite movie too, so he and Bobby and Ray joined them, and Kurt had never seen it, so Kitty dragged him onto the floor in front of the couch and caught him up to where they were, and Rogue leaned against the wall behind them all with her usual cool and before long, half the school was clustered around the television. And then they watched _The Karate Kid II_ instead of training, even though it wasn't as good as the first and he couldn't quite sit through all of it. Instead, he and Tyra went back to her room to play checkers until dinner time, because every good fighter had a little bit of strategy, too.

At the end of the day, Logan was exhausted – more exhausted than he'd expected to be – but he didn't mind it. Not even a little. He was glad he wasn't going to be doing this again tomorrow, but he was equally glad he'd done it today. As he waited for Tyra to come back from chasing down her usual string of goodnight hugs and kisses, he made the same routine checks he did every night. Towel actually hung up to dry? Check. Toothbrush damp? Check. Dirty clothes put away in the laundry basket? Check. Then he made sure her gameboy and flashlight and latest book were all safely away from the bed and looked under her pillow in case she was hiding anything that would keep her up all night on a school night. Clear.

The routine of it all reminded him that he needed to mow the lawn tomorrow and made him feel like today was already slipping away before it was even finished. But that was the way of it, he supposed. Being immortal, or nearly so, seemed to make time go faster, not slower, and Tyra was growing up at what seemed like lightning speed. And there wasn't much he could do about it. So he picked out the longest picture book on the shelf for her bedtime story, swung her dramatically into bed when she ran back in, and continued to make the most of their sick day until Tyra fell asleep. And then he kissed her on the forehead and whispered "I love you best of all."


	3. Chicks 'n Ducks 'n Geese Better Scurry

**Description: Tyra is 7. They get trapped in a cave. Logan comforts her and reminisces about another time he was stuck in a confined space with his daughter.**

* * *

Logan hated feeling helpless. It always seemed to bring out the very, very worst in him, and it was hard not to let himself get violent and wild. But now he was both helpless _and _trapped in a cave with his 7-year-old, and the one thing he _couldn't_ do was go feral right now. Clawing at the walls wouldn't actually get them out, not when the entrance had caved in this badly, and losing his temper at the situation wasn't the kind of example he could afford to set for his already-volatile daughter.

Tyra was so much like him sometimes that it was almost frightening, and he had seen in her face when the rocks collapsed in on them that she wanted to fling herself bodily at the cave's blocked entrance just as badly as he did. They didn't like being cornered, he and his daughter, and their instinctive reaction was to lash out and to destroy the thing cornering them. But it wasn't the proper response to every situation, and beating up a pile of rocks wasn't going to help them now. He had to keep calm, because he needed Tyra to keep calm, and he needed to show her that the right thing to do when you were trapped was not to panic.

Taking a deep breath, he turned away from the wall of rubble to face the rest of the cave. He was lucky that 'Ro had shoved a lantern into his hand before they left the mansion, and even luckier that he'd brought it with him even though he didn't really think they'd need it. But as she had reminded him at the time, he and Tyra had a bad habit of deciding that since they didn't want to come home they could manage "just 20 more minutes" in the woods and continuing to decide that it was true _every _20 minutes until it was pitch-black outside and they ran into patrols on their way back to the car because their favorite hiking area wasn't actually a camp ground and people had gotten worried about the "lost people" who ought to have returned to the little blue car in the parking lot.

The lantern was electric, and because Charles was overzealous about these things sometimes, it had a crank that could be turned to power it if the batteries ran out. It was also surprisingly bright, lighting the entire interior of the admittedly-small cave and letting him see Tyra clearly.

His daughter was curled against the back wall of the cave with her knees tucked up under her chin, and she was clearly taking very seriously the fact that he'd told her to stay calm while he checked it out. Walking over to her, he crouched down, so that he'd be at eye level. "We're stuck, Tiger. We're just gonna have to wait it out." She nodded solemnly, still working very hard to stay calm.

He didn't know what, exactly, she was trying to hide – his money was on either fear or indignation, but sometimes Tyra surprised him. Either way, he knew it wasn't good for her to squash her emotions down for as long as they were going to be stuck here, and he knew that she wouldn't be able to manage it for long anyway. So he might as well at least try to comfort her, for now.

Moving to sit beside her and draping an arm around her shoulders, he gently tipped her over until she was leaning against his side like she did on the couch sometimes when they were feeling sedentary enough to try watching a movie. She nestled into his shoulder, half head-butting him in the process, but he could tell she felt at least a little bit better at the contact.

"Well, _now_ what are we gonna do? Waiting is boring." Tyra's voice was carefully controlled, still, and he _definitely _had to fix it, because while not being panicked was good, she didn't even sound like herself the way she was at the moment. Without saying anything, he reached for the ticklish spot on her side and she squeaked and rolled away from him. "Daddy!" she exclaimed, half exasperated and half gleeful, and before long they were wrestling on the cave floor until he could pin her down and tickle her into giggly submission.

It didn't take up as much time as it could have, but it seemed to make Tyra feel better. Not surprising. It always helped to feel like things were normal, even if they weren't. And once some of the pent-up tension was gone, Tyra seemed much more relaxed. She was still fidgety and restless, but it was her normal level of fidgetiness and restlessness, so he wasn't worried about her anymore. She was going to come through this ordeal alright.

It was already late afternoon, so Logan had hoped that they'd be found fairly soon, but as time dragged on, he began to realize how long it was really going to be. The people in charge of the trail wouldn't worry about their car in the parking lot until it was fully dark out, and if they remembered the car from the last few times he and Tyra had let their hikes drag too long, they might not worry until a little after that.

No one at the mansion would think to assume there was a problem until much later than that – probably 10 or 11. They knew how long the two of them could spend hiking, and then they would assume they were eating dinner out somewhere or that they were just out driving around so that they didn't have to come home yet.

But they wouldn't let them stay out _indefinitely_ and they were certain to come looking for them by around midnight at the latest. Finding them would be a whole other story, of course, but it would happen eventually. He just wasn't sure what "eventually" meant.

Luckily, Tyra was good at amusing herself, and before long she'd made up a whole complicated game that involved throwing rocks at various spots inside the cave, at the rocks that had already been thrown, and occasionally at him, but he got the feeling that when she said things like "You can only throw rocks at _people_ if it's exactly 4 turns after you hit that spot over there," what she meant was "Silly Daddy! Only _I_ get to throw rocks at _you_."

She kept winning, but she was also making up the rules as they went along, so that was mostly to be expected. And she was happy, or at least happy enough, and that was what counted. Even so, he was starting to feel restless, too. He'd never been claustrophobic, but he _did _wish he could stretch his legs a little more. The cave was only about the size of one of the bedrooms at the mansion, and it didn't take long to walk from one end to the other, which contributed to the fact that even with the constantly shifting rules, the game was getting boring.

By the time they'd been trapped there for three and a half hours, even Tyra was so bored with the game that she couldn't play it anymore, and clearly a little tired, too, from the fact that they'd been hiking all day. (Frankly, the fact that it tired her out was half of the reason they _went _hiking so often – the others at the mansion always seemed happiest when he and Tyra had been blowing off a little steam on at least a semi-regular basis.)

She threw down her rock with a pout and then kicked it angrily toward the pile of rocks in the entrance and he could tell she was right on the edge of not being able to behave herself anymore. Calling her name, he held his arms out and she ran into them, burying her face in his shoulder as he picked her up. She was getting to be too big for him to carry around, but it didn't mean he didn't do it anyway. "Sorry, Daddy," she said, voice muffled by his shoulder.

After hugging her tight for a moment, he put her back down on her feet. "It's ok, Tiger. I'm tired of being in here too. But they're coming. We've just gotta wait." Her face slid into a pout and he gestured toward the back of the cave. "Come on, Ty. Lay down. It's almost bedtime anyway. They might even get here before you wake up."

Her mouth opened like she was about to utter her usual bedtime protests, but then it snapped shut again. She _wasn't _in the middle of something, there was no bath to try to scam more time out of him by skipping, and even if she said she wasn't tired, there was nothing else to _do_. Narrowing her eyes, she asked "Are _you_ gonna go to bed?"

He didn't know what answer she was looking for, but he knew it didn't matter. They'd been through this enough times for Tyra to know that bedtime meant bedtime meant bedtime, at least when it was him telling her so. "Don't worry, I'll be awake to help them if they come looking."

She sighed. "I _guess_ I could go to bed, then. If I _have _to."

He had to keep a straight face, and he did – but he was laughing a little on the inside. Even now, she couldn't admit that she just wanted to go to bed. "You have to."

It took him a while to get Tyra settled down on the smoothest piece of the cave floor they could find, her head pillowed on his shirt because it was all he had to give her. Now that it was getting dark outside, the temperature was starting to drop in the cave and he would probably be cold in just his undershirt before morning, but he knew he wouldn't mind.

This whole fatherhood thing had settled him down shockingly fast and even though he could feel himself turning into that totally uncool Dad guy he'd pitied for so long he couldn't stop it from happening. He told himself that once Tyra was grown up, he could go back to the whole motorcycle vagrant, bar-hopping thing instead of being so tied down, and because he didn't age, it was probably true. Not that it mattered at times like this, because at times like this, loving Tyra was more important than his freedom anyway.

He was sitting by the entrance, on the other side of the cave from Tyra, but he could still tell that she wasn't asleep. Even so, as long as she was still _trying_ to sleep, he might as well let her. The best part of her growing up a little was that he could send her back to bed and hope that she could fall asleep on her own instead of feeling responsible for it.

After a while, though, she got up, hugging his shirt like she usually did her teddy bear, and came over to his side of the cave. "It's no good. I can't sleep at _all_" she said with a sigh. Moving a little to lean his back against the wall of the cave, he held his arms open and Tyra crawled into them, sitting on his lap with her head pillowed against his chest, nearly on his shoulder. He spread his shirt over her legs like a blanket, kissing her forehead.

"That's ok," he said with a sigh, "You didn't sleep when you were a baby, either."

She twisted to look up at him. "I didn't?"

He laughed, tucking his cheek against the side of her head. "Nope. You screamed the second I put you in your crib and you wouldn't stop until I picked you up again. Not that you'd sleep when I was holding you either. You just kept trying to play with me."

She grinned. "I _knew _I was a fun baby."

He snorted before he could stop himself. "Tyra, I think you were the least fun baby I've ever heard of. You wouldn't sleep unless I put you in your car seat and drove around with you, and I don't think I slept more than an hour or two a night until you were a year and a half old."

"Oh." She sounded disappointed, so he kissed her temple again.

"Eh, don't beat yourself up, Tiger. At least I like driving." He even _still_ liked driving, which was a bit of a miracle. More miraculous still, he remembered those days with vague fondness.

At the time, he was pretty sure he'd been thinking about how much he hated the slightly battered little blue car, bought because it was cheap and he could put a car seat in it and because even though Charles had plenty of cars for the X-men to use in general, he liked owning vehicles of his own. He had, admittedly, let the Professor help pay for _gas_ once he'd started clocking a couple hundred miles a night, but the car was his. And he'd hated it and he'd missed his motorcycle and he'd dreamed of the day his kid would be old enough to stick on the back of the motorcycle instead, because he hadn't realized yet that Tyra was the sort to jump _off _the motorcycle if she got the idea in her head that she wanted to get off and look at something.

Now, the car just made him think of all that driving, out on the empty highway in the moonlight with Tyra zonked out in her car seat in the back, and he suspected he'd be driving it for a few more years yet – probably until Tyra needed a vehicle of her own, though the thought of entrusting his wild child with a few thousand pounds of deadly metal made him nervous in a way that just reminded him how unbelievably Dad-like he'd become in the last few years.

After a few minutes of silence, Tyra yawned. "I wish we could get in the car and drive _now_. I wanna go to sleep and wake up at home."

He stroked her hair gently. "I wish we could, too." He'd been on enough long car rides in the last few years to know that Tyra slept badly in a car now that she was older, if she slept at all. Not that she hadn't woken up a few times a night even back then. He'd played the radio, he'd driven in silence, he'd left static running as white noise, and none of it had seemed to change how much Tyra still woke up and fussed if they changed speeds while he was driving.

Then, one day, Scott's car had broken down and he'd had to take Jean to soccer practice and she'd accidentally dropped one of her cassette tapes out of her bag. He'd found it in the car and slipped it into the tape deck because he'd been prepared to try just about anything and it had turned out that something about _Oklahoma! _kept Tyra quiet and calm, even when she woke up in her car seat, and it sent her off to sleep again faster than she ever had before.

He still had to drive, but he didn't have to worry as much about keeping a perfectly steady speed, because she slept more deeply, and he didn't have to worry about not taking roads that curved too much and he didn't have to worry about the radio changing to something too loud and rowdy and everything had gotten easier.

And suddenly he had an idea. "I tell you what. Why don't you just close your eyes and we'll _pretend _we're driving. I'll even do you one better – we can drive something cool." Tyra gave him a confused look, but then did it with a sigh, leaning back against him and squeezing her eyes shut tight. He closed his own eyes for a moment, thinking through the words, but he didn't have to worry – they came back immediately. This song had always been his favorite of the lot, maybe just because it was basically about what he'd been doing at the time, and he knew it like the back of his hand.

Rocking gently side to side with Tyra along for the ride, he started to sing softly, tweaking the lyrics at will. "When I take you home tonight with me – Tyra, here's the way it's gonna be: You will sit behind a team of snow white horses, in the slickest gig you'll ever see." He paused. "Can you see the horses pulling the little carriage?" She nodded, eyes still squeezed tight shut. "Good."

He picked up where he'd left off. "Chicks 'n ducks 'n geese better scurry, when I take you home in the surrey, when I take you home in the surrey with the fringe on top!" he realized as he sang it that Tyra probably had no idea what a surrey was, but he wasn't sure it mattered. She'd figure it out, and if she didn't it was all about her imagination anyway. "Watch that fringe and see how it flutters when I drive them high steppin' strutters. Nosey pokes'll peek through their shutters and their eyes will pop!"

Probably true. It would be a heck of a thing, now that it was the 21st century, to ride down the street in a horse-drawn carriage, but he bet Tyra would love it. The song moved on to a description of the surrey itself and the smile spreading across Tyra's face proved he was right. She at least certainly liked the idea of it. Which was ok, because he did too.

"The wheels are yellow, the upholstery's brown, the dashboard's genuine leather. With isinglass curtains you c'n roll right down, in case there's a change in the weather. Two bright sidelights winkin' and blinkin'. Ain't no finer rig I'm a-thinkin'. You can keep your rig if you're thinkin' that I'd care to swap for that shiny, little surrey with the fringe on the top!"

The next bit should have been talking, but he could feel Tyra relaxing against him, so he skipped over it and started singing again. "All the world'll fly in a flurry, when I take you home in the surrey, when I take you home in the surrey with the fringe on top. When we hit that road, hell fer leather, cats and dogs'll dance in the heather, birds and frogs'll sing all together and the toads will hop! The wind'll whistle as we rattle along, the cows'll moo in the clover, the river will ripple out a whispered song, and whisper it over and over."

He didn't know if it was the peaceful descriptions or the song itself or just the fact that daydreaming was calm and kept her mind off of the fact that she didn't think she could sleep, but Tyra was almost fully asleep now – it was working. "Don't you wish y'd go on forever? Don't you wish y'd go on forever? Don't you wish y'd go on forever and y'd never stop, in that shiny little surrey with the fringe on the top?"

She was so close to asleep now that he went ahead and sang that part again – the repeat wasn't in the original song, but he sure wasn't going to do the talking, not with her so close to nodding off. "Don't you wish y'd go on forever? Don't you wish y'd go on forever? Don't you wish y'd go on forever and y'd never stop, in that shiny little surrey with the fringe on the top?"

Her breathing was slow and even, but he wasn't completely certain that she was deeply enough asleep to stay that way. And anyway, the last part of the song had always been his favorite, and he might as well sing it, even if he was only singing to himself by the end of it. There was no reason not to, not with his daughter growing up so fast, and not when the words of the song were so close to what was actually happening right now.

Voice dropping a little quieter, he finished "I can see the stars gettin' blurry, when we ride back home in the surrey, ridin' slowly home in the surrey with the fringe on top. I can feel the day gettin' older, feel a sleepy head near my shoulder. Noddin', droopin', close to my shoulder, till it falls kerplop! The sun is swimmin' on the rim of a hill; the moon is takin' a header, and just as I'm thinkin' all the earth is still, a lark wakes up in the medder."

That bit was not so true – their rescuers might be on their way, but they certainly weren't here yet. Even so, with Tyra sleeping in his arms, _really _sleeping now, he couldn't stop himself from singing the line that had made him like this song to begin with. "Hush, you bird, my baby's a-sleepin'! Maybe she's got a dream worth a-keepin'. Whoa! you team, and just keep a-creepin' at a slow clip clop. Don't you hurry with the surrey with the fringe on the top!"

Humming, he started the song over again, not wanting to wake Tyra up by stopping any more than he'd wanted to wake her up by turning the tape off or stopping the car all those years ago. And anyway, it worked ok as a lullaby, especially the end bit, which he hadn't had to change at all because it really _was _about driving home while . . . well, in the story, it was the man's girlfriend falling asleep on his shoulder, but his little girl fit the bill well enough because he was pretty sure he could never love anyone romantically as much as he loved his daughter paternally, anyway.

After a while he switched to humming "Many a New Day," because with a baby girl in the back, he'd done plenty of thinking about that song, too – Tyra didn't seem like she was growing up into the kind of woman who moaned about her love life, which was a relief – and so he remembered it pretty well. And when that got old, he switched back to "The Surrey With The Fringe On Top" because he realized that he could only remember the A side of the cassette – he'd listened to it more often than the B side because he liked this song so much, and with the exception of the actual song "Oklahoma", the B side was all muddled up in his mind.

He was still humming "The Surrey" when the X-men found them, Kitty and Kurt phasing and poofing straight into the cave beside him to get them out, and he kept doing it because the part of him that had been trained to keep Tyra asleep when she was an infant wouldn't quite let him stop even now.

Everyone else looked incredulous, but he wasn't surprised at all when Tyra slept straight through the others' arrival, dozed against his shoulder all the way down to the car, and made it home to bed without ever waking up. Kids were unpredictable, mutant kids doubly so, but Tyra would always be Tyra, and it was nice to know that at least he knew his _own_ kid better than anyone else did.


End file.
